Well-designed phones like the Samsung Galaxy S know how to make using your mobile quicker and easier, and when smartphones are quickly squeezing their way into every part of our lives, this speed factor is becoming incredibly important. If you’re paying £30 a month for the privilege of using a phone, why put up with being slowed down? The Samsung Galaxy S puts a truckload of measures in place to speed-up your mobile movements.
What’s in a gesture?
The Samsung Galaxy S is at the forefront of screen technology – not only is the screen larger than the average at four inches, it uses the new Super AMOLED display and a capacitive touchscreen. To make the most of its super-responsive touch panel, it incorporates some great gesture functionality into its interface.
The Swype keyboard is an entirely optional extra, but it could change the way you text and write emails. Standard Android keyboards rely on constant tap-tap-tapping on virtual keys, but Swype is a bit more intelligent. When writing words using Swype, you don’t have to take your finger off the screen. You just drag a path over the relevant letters and the Samsung Galaxy S works out which letters you intended to land on. It’s frighteningly accurate as standard, but also corrects any blunders you might have made.
One of our favourite revolutions capacitive screens have brought is multi-touch, and it’s the star of the Samsung Galaxy S’s web browsing. Using the multi-touch pinch zoom gesture, you can whiz around web pages without having to press any virtual buttons to hone-in on a section of text or an image. It makes browsing speedier, and gives your movements an organic feel. The Galaxy S also makes use of the same manoeuvre when zooming in and out of photos in the built-in gallery. Multi-touch shows how the latest generations of smartphones are taking intuitiveness to the next level.
Built-in bad boys
The Swype and pinch zoom features tweak your mobile experience, but built-in widgets and menu features are even more obvious ways to boost your mobile efficiency. From any of your Samsung Galaxy S’s home screens, you can access a pull-down menu with a simple swipe downwards from the top of the screen.
This menu shows you any notifications you may have missed out on – new messages, missed calls, running apps… the works – and is the key to keeping your mobile usage slick and quick. Third-party apps can interface with this drop-down menu too, so it’s not just for built-in features, but for your Android Market exploits too.
The Samsung Galaxy S comes with more than a dozen built-in widgets, but the one that’s most useful for speeding-up your day-to-day mobile life is the power control widget. It only takes up a single row of a home screen’s real estate, and will not only save you time but will increase your battery life too. The widget features a handful of buttons that let you instantly toggle power-hungry features like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth – normally you’d have to head over to the Settings menu to turn these features on and off.
…and that’s just the beginning
A huge part of the appeal of the Android operating system is how much you can tailor your experience to your needs. The Samsung Galaxy S comes with a bundle of widgets, but a quick trawl through the Android Market app store will reveal even more ways to streamline how your phone runs. Widgets included in the Beautiful Widget package combine clocks with weather forecasts to give you constant updates on, well, the weather, time and date while only taking up a fraction of one home screen.
Check out the Samsung Galaxy S in action…
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